Community Informatics and Information Systems: can they ... - CiteSeerX

Community Informatics and Information Systems: can they be better connected?

Larry Stillman and Henry Linger Faculty of Information Technology, Monash University {larry.stillman, henry.linger}@infotech.monash.edu.au

Uncorrected ms, for The Information Society, 2009

Abstract. There is an ongoing debate in Community Informatics about the need for a stronger conceptual and theoretical base in order to give the field disciplinary cohesion and direction. By investigating the body of reflective thinking in Information Systems, researchers in Community Informatics can develop a more rigorous theoretical context for their work. Information Systems can be considered as a fragmented adhocracy that allows many intellectual communities to co-exist under its umbrella. The social, political, cultural and community orientation of Community Informatics provides a strong cultural distinction from the usual industrial, commercial and organisational orientation of Information Systems. A sympathetic reading of Information Systems offers an opportunity to Community Informatics to address both social and technological issues in its theoretical framework. This framework would be based on a common language that expresses a shared ontology and epistemology with Information Systems. Such a framework then allows Community Informatics to fully address its information systems problem solving agenda as well as its community problem solving activities. Strengthening this dual agenda will allow Community Informatics to work effectively with both the technical and social design and implementation problems. But it also provides Communty Informatics with an opportunity to contribute to a discourse within Information Systems in order to broaden the traditional Information Systems concept of organisation and social action. Keywords: community informatics; information systems; dual agenda

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Introduction Community Informatics (CI) is an emergent discipline with a dual focus: first, the conduct of research about the relationship between the design of Information and Communications Technologies (ICTs) and local communities, and second, the implementation of ICT projects in local communities. By local communities, CI includes both geographic locations, such as a neighbourhood or a district, as well as the networks of local structures and organisations that constitute the human fabric of such communities including its information infrastructure. Also we assume it is axiomatic amongst researchers and practitioners that CI uses ICTs for positive social change in civil society and that ICT projects are conducted in conjunction with the stakeholders in the local community The concern of CI is about the relationship between people and technology. It is expressed in its focus on solving community problems articulated in community activism at the political, social and cultural levels. This orientation is strongly influenced by antagonism to techno-utopianism and techno-determinism. As an example, social and community issues, and their interaction with ICTs in civil society, were the overwhelmingly majority of the 90 or so research issues and questions that were identified at the 2006 Prato, Italy CI Conference. Very few questions emerged about the design of ICTs 1. This community orientation isolates CI from many potential useful technological perspectives that derive from the theoretical frameworks of Information Systems (IS) and Information Systems Design (ISD). This has consequently led to the CI agenda having a ‘thin’ conception of its technological agenda. What is lacking is, for want of a better term, a conceptual taxonomy to help elucidate the many components that would contribute to defining CI as a discipline whose agenda is information systems problem-solving, in addition to its community problem-solving orientation of CI. This requires an exploration of how critical thinking in IS could be exploited by CI. We contend that the rich theoretical infrastructure that IS has established can be deployed to understand the social and technical needs of CI. Many of the problems that CI deals with, whether on a social or methodological level, have already been dealt with by IS, but IS discourse, does not easily describe circumstances that that are familiar to CI. This highlights that, while IS lacks appropriate examples relevant for a community focus, it also points to the absence in CI of a coherent effort to adapt the paradigmatic descriptors of IS and its methods of analysing and describing processes and procedures. However, this gap between the disciplines does not represent a core ontological problem in IS theorization. IS has developed high level abstractions and frameworks for problem-solving within the context of different situations or structures in society, whether they are in a business or a community. But IS does neglect community-based theorization as is evidenced in its emphasis on the dominant ‘industrial’ or business paradigm in its research agendas and theoretical literature. This dominant paradigm of IS research means that its concerns are business processes, functionalities, and controls (De Moor and De Cindio 2007) rather than social, political or cultural impact. Thus there is also a ‘thin’ conception of the social in IS thinking, including Soft Systems Methodology (Checkland 1993), as observed by Walsham et al. (1995; Lamb and Kling 2003). Our contention is that there are reciprocal benefits for both disciplines from a more substantive engagement with each other. Our concern is that the current perception of tension between CI and IS has led to an unnecessary gap between the two fields. The perceived contradictions between the social and technical orientation of the two disciplines is misplaced. What is needed is a way of adapting and communicating the theory frame of IS to strengthen the conceptual, theoretical and practical activity of CI while also evolving the IS theoretical framework to accommodate the social, and in particular the community, agenda.

1

http://ccnr.webstylus.net/wiki/index.php?n=Main.TheBigQuestions (6-11 October 2006, Monash Centre, Prato, Italy)

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In this paper we highlight some key issues that underpin new points of theory and research activity directed towards strengthening the theoretical basis of CI. Examining the theoretical frame, language and taxonomy of IS will provide the language tools to assist CI researchers to critically examine what IS can or does not offer. This would be the first step towards building a theoretically coherent picture of the tasks and issues that form the CI agenda and identify what areas within CI need development on a theoretical level. But this process will also identify the contributions that CI can make to IS theory. The point is to articulate an overarching theoretical framework that accommodates the CI agenda.

The Agenda of CI One of the most influential definitions of CI has been that developed by Gurstein stating that: “Community Informatics pays attention to physical communities and the design and implementation of technologies and applications, which enhance and promote their objectives. CI begins with ICT, as providing resources and tools that communities and their members can use for local economic, cultural and civic development, and community health and environmental initiatives among others.” (Gurstein 2000: 2). Such a definitions requires, as Bradley suggests, a ‘new kind of engineer’, one trained with a broader and deeper understanding of socio-technical issues, rather than one with technical training focused on a narrow, instrumental approach to technology (Bradley 2006). This is consistent with Gurstein’s more recent and broader understanding of the multiple and intersecting dimensions of CI that include social activism, community development, policy studies and public administration, ICTs for Development, and service design as well as the more classical link to Management Information Systems (Gurstein 2008: 13-14). This leads to an understanding of CI as engaged in a specific form of social practice at a micro-level of society, rather than an engagement at a macro-social or institutional level, that addresses lived-in and often needy or disadvantaged communities. This orientation is often predicated on theories of social change (Kubisch 1997), and is associated with community development practice in both developed or developing countries (Rothman and Tropman 1970; Heeks 2002). In recognition of the many other fields of research and action that influence CI practice, Gurstein has now suggested a broader conception of the CI agenda, which now becomes: “… a commitment to universality of technology-enabled opportunity including to the disadvantaged; a recognition that the “lived physical community” is at the very center of individual and family well-being – economic, political, and cultural; a belief that this can be enhanced through the judicious use of ICT; a sophisticated user-focused understanding of Information Technology; and applied social leadership, entrepreneurship and creativity’ (Heeks 2002; Gurstein 2008: 12). Much of the research in CI is thus devoted to enabling ‘effective use’ in a ‘lived’ communities setting for the purpose of innovative social-technical activity. Such activities include capturing community memory for community empowerment (Stillman and Johanson 2007), and in developing countries, poverty amelioration, literacy development, or AIDS information (Heeks 2008). Consequently, CI sees lived-in and situated communities not as passive recipients of technological opportunities, but as verbs; actors engaged in the comprehension and ‘doing’ of community problem-solving directed to social progress.

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The Technological Dimension of CI This emphasis within the CI literature on community problem-solving means the ‘technological’ angle is downplayed with a ‘black box’ approach to ICTs. This approach views ICTs, as a technological given rather than as a malleable set of arrangements. Moreover, ICTs are seen as tools for social justice for communities rather than as tools for the community itself (Stoecker 2005: 45-46). The practical emphasis on community problemsolving within the literature means that the theoretical agenda of CI, if there is one, appears to be predominantly bound up with the world of practical sociology. The reasons for this may in fact be educational and political in origin. The CI research community tends to reflect an oppositional stance to instrumental rationality and associated technologies (Habermas 1972; Rose 1999). Though there has been no survey done of CI researchers, it appears that many come from a humanities background or social activities. In this background there is cultural resistance to technological determinism, or at least an experienced resistance to what is perceived as the negatively material and controlling aspect of ICT artefacts, but this attitude ignores current thinking in the world of human-technology interaction and interpretation. Thus, adapting what Day and colleagues (Day, Farenden et al. 2007), have suggested, CI can be seen as an emergent normative framework. This framework seeks to use ICTs in a particular way focusing on participative community change, somewhat in opposition to assumptions about a natural alignment between governance, rationality, and technology. Such change is poised at a nexus of practice, policy and research about and for ‘lived’, bedrock communities. CI has strongly emphasized the centrality of ‘people and place’ in community development, together with the importance of what Chester Barnard identified seven decades ago as ‘the informal organisation’, the things that provide meaning and solidarity within formal organisations. In this sense, communities and informal community structures and alliances can be considered as organisations. At the centre of the ‘design, uses and consequences of information technologies’ (Kling 2000: 218) in CI is a very particular sort of organisation that is not a business, government, commercial, industrial or academic community but more often than not a community structure that interacts with social, cultural or economic deprivation. The specific emphasis of CI on participatory community change presents a strong case for moving from the abstract prototypical, ‘atomic, individualistic user’, devoid of location in complex and multi-dimensional real world environments, to the ‘social actor’(Lamb and Kling 2003). The notion of the ’atomic’ individual theorizes and models a ‘person’ in a way that attempt to strip the individual of any agency except that of ‘rational’ choice. In contrast, the social actor is an agent; a real person, with multiple allegiances, roles, and reactions. This concept of the social actor is well-established in social psychology (Goffman 1983) but Lamb and Kling also draw on research in computer supported cooperative work (CSCW), Scandinavian Social Technology Studies (Bradley 2006), and structuration theory (Giddens 1984) to situate this concept in a socio-technical context. This allows the design of ICTs to move away from the convenience of a stripped down atomic ‘person’ as the prototypical “user” that can be easily matched to system design criteria for instrumental artefacts. In the context of a work organisation, Lamb and Kling suggest that people: … are simultaneously enabled and constrained by the socio-technical affiliations and environments of the firm, its members, and its industry…They often have conflicting and ambiguous requirements about

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the activities they perform, and the socially legitimate ways in which to perform their work … (Lamb and Kling 2003 p. 218). Such an approach avoids an idealized and deterministic fit between people and technology. It considers a situated, systematic, and longitudinal investigation of people and technology (De Moor 2007) within the context of a community with all its inherent complexity. It also allows human agency to result in restlessly re-configurable and unpredictable interactivity with technology (Orlikowski 1992; Suchman 1996; Orlikowski 2000). This many-sided conceptualization of the changing relationship between people and technology is very different to the black-box design common to the technologically normative orientation and certainly leads to epistemological difficulties in having a depth understanding of the complexities of artefacts as material objects (Leonardi and Barley 2008), in preference for social analysis and particularly social action For CI, the complex interactions between people and technology can thus be considered as a socio-technical network that: … includes people (including organizations), equipment, data, diverse resources (money, skill, status), documents and messages, legal arrangements and enforcement mechanisms, and resource flows. The elements of a [socio-technical network] are heterogeneous. The network relationships between these elements include: social, economic, and political interactions (Kling, McKim et al. 2003: 48). Viewing such a network through the lens of Actor Network Theory (ANT) (Callon 2001), CI can also be prompted to disregard design idealization and practical determinism by considering a social-technical network as emergent from negotiation that occurs between all elements in the network. Negotiations are subject to all the vagaries of asymmetric power relationships and degrees of agency of the different elements, resulting in a sociotechnical artefact that is an ensemble of social and technical interests (Orlikowski and Iacono 2001). For CI in particular, different community relationships and technologies produce an assemblage of reproduced and socially-embedded practices and resources to support, in particular, social solidarity and human agency (Bhattacharyya 1995), as distinct from corporate solidarity and agency, geared around the profit motive or different forms of government operations. The community, as a social-technical network, thus instantiates dimensions of community power, race, class, gender, and politics, while ICTs are but one technology in the ensemble of tools and processes that serve community ends. Thus, within communities, Foucault’s concept of ‘technologies of power, which determine the conduct of individuals and submit them to certain ends or domination’ (Foucault 1988), are applied to the design of social-technical systems such as community networks through ‘mechanisms, techniques and procedures at work in the production and distribution (management if you will) of knowledge in particular settings’(Ekbia and Kling 2003). This results in CI adopting particular ways of approaching technologies at hand for what can be called community-oriented governance of technology artefacts for social ends. With its focus on community problem-solving and its specific orientation to technology, the open question is whether CI is in fact part of the ’fragmented adhocracy’ that is IS (Banville and Landry 1989), and if so how does CI define itself as an ’intellectual community’ within this adhocracy. Taking this further, the issue for CI is how the ontology of IS, its structure and vocabulary, can be used to set the CI research agenda and how CI can engage in a productive discourse with IS. In the next section we explore a framework for IS for its potential to provide such an ontology that is inclusive of CI and provides the vocabulary for a discourse between CI and IS.

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A Critical Approach to Information Systems To someone with a social or community rather than a technological background, such as researchers or practitioners in CI, understanding just what IS is and does is not easy. This is due in part to the technological imperative of IS, and its particular discourse epistemology, coupled with its strong organisational and in particular, business and commercial focus. A starting point for understanding IS is to accept that information system development (ISD) is the central activity of IS and this involves the purposeful construction of a technological artefact. Other issues (users, interfaces, contexts, uses, techniques, technology) are meaningless without an artefact as the object of inquiry (Hirschheim, Klein et al. 1996; Leonardi and Barley 2008). This highlights a significant divergence between IS and the community problem-solving agenda of CI discussed above. But it also highlights the theoretical weakness of CI that lacks ontology for its technical endeavours. There is widespread acknowledgement within IS that it lacks coherence and a shared understanding of the IS discipline from within its own ranks; a familiar situation in many ad hoc and emerging disciplines (Kuhn 1970: 148; O'Donovan and Roode 2002). As an emerging discipline, IS does not have an adequate and accumulated research tradition, instead it is best considered as a fragmented adhocracy (Banville and Landry 1989), that allows different research communities to fall under the IS umbrella. Hirschheim et al. (1996) believe that the imposition of a conceptual unity over this diversity is intellectually dangerous. They propose a ‘federated’ IS framework that provides the theoretical basis for a fragmented adhocracy that they believe should characterise IS into the future. Within the many fields that fall under this putative federation are areas that are of specific interest to CI researchers but CI’s conceptual and theoretical linkages with these areas are weak. The framework proposed by Hirschheim et al. (1996) provides a challenging but comprehensive overview of IS. It is not the only framework that has been proposed within IS, but we believe it is a good starting point for thinking about IS, and particularly ISD, in relation to CI (Walsham 1995; Fisher and Karlheinz 2007). The framework is proposed to “ … provide[s] categories for interpreting … research literature and for understanding the co-evolution … of diverse research concerns” rather than as a paradigm that “refers to a core set of consistent assumptions … that guide [a] research agenda” (Hirschheim, Klein et al. 1996: 5). The theoretical basis for the framework draws on social action theories that combine Habermas’ concept of orientation, that express human intentions in respect to change, and Etzioni’s concept of malleability, which focuses on the subject of the action that result in change (Etzioni 1968; Habermas 1984). Thus the framework is expressed as a matrix with orientation and domains as its two dimensions. This is a space that defines action and change in respect to ISD. Adopting social action theory as the analytical lens for the framework is significant from the perspective of CI. This orientation considers ISD as a socio-materialist design activity that must also deal “with the changing conditions and forms of social behaviour brought about by the design outcome” and take account of the “historical context and social influences” (Hirschheim and Klien, 1987 quoted in Hirschheim et al., 1996: 7). The significant aspect of this approach to IS, and one that distinguishes it from social science, is that it seeks to integrate instrumental rationality, the technological artefact and its construction, with the social activity which contextualises the artefact. Moreover, drawing on the critical social theory of both Habermas and Etzioni, Heirschheim et al. focus on both social action and change while adopting a finer granularity that allows the subject of inquiry to be an organisation or community, rather than just the broad social context. The two axis of the framework are domains of change, the objects that are changed by ISD, and orientations that signify the purpose of the change brought about by ISD. There are three fundamental orientations: control, sense-making (communicative) and argumentation (discursive); but a distinction is made between control over objects (instrumental) and humans (strategic). This distinction is important as instrumental control treats people as physical objects while the latter treats them as intelligent agents. The domains are technology (the artefacts), language (all forms of communication) and organisation. This typology is reminiscent of the modification of Giddens’ original model of structuration theory, developed by Orlikowski (1992) and others, in which technology-in-practice is both the medium and the outcome of human agency in mediation with facilities (such as technical artefacts), norms (organisations, communities and their variable cultures), and interpretive schemes (such as language/communications and all that is mediated by it).

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Table 1. Object system classes (adapted from (Hirschheim, Klein et al. 1996, passim)).

Cross relating domains and orientations generates a “matrix of change frames … [as] a taxonomy of object systems which embodies, in an abstract way, the variance in the content and target of ISD” (Hirschheim et al., 1996: 7). Table 1, above, conflates six complex tables presented by Hirschheim et al. (1996) showing only the most relevant components to indicate a future CI conceptual, theoretical and practical agenda. It is interesting to note that the Control Orientation, concerned with the development of technical systems (the Instrumental and Strategic Columns), represents the object systems that are most familiar and most visible aspects of IS. Unfortunately they are also what are often considered of as the dominant aspect of IS. It is this limited and onedimensional perception of IS that has led to the perceived contradictions between the social and technical orientation of CI and IS.

Reading CI Through the Lens of the IS Framework Critical social theory makes behaviour and social, political and historical contingencies visible in the construction process of the technical artefact. This visibility provides space to express both the CI agenda and its technological orientation. When this space is examined critically, IS provides the opportunity to question the methodological approaches to investigating social phenomena, the purpose of that enquiry and the relationship between theory and practice. Also important is how the domains of change are understood. Thus even though organisation is considered simply as “socially organised behaviour”, technology covers both the physical paraphernalia as well as the technical know-how that can exploit those physical objects, Furthermore, language is any form of symbolic representation that covers everything from natural language to the precisely defined systems for information processing through to the semiotics of organisational symbols. Significantly, ISD needs to address each domain in some way in order to construct a functioning IS. Such broad understanding of domains allows the CI agenda to be adequately expressed within this ontology of IS. In Table 1 the object systems in bold represents particular object systems, the design discipline strategies and bodies of literature relevant to CI. The hatching in the Table represents the current focus of CI and emphasises the Communicative Sense-Making orientation inherent in the community problem-solving agenda of CI. What this view highlights is the neglect by CI of both the Control and Argumentation orientation. The implications for CI are that it needs to adopt a dual agenda which addresses equally both its community problem-solving agenda and its information systems problem-solving agenda. To address this dual agenda, CI needs to develop a theoretical position that recognises the inherent dialectical relationship between these agendas. In order to move towards a dual agenda CI needs to critically analyse its current stance towards technology and its uses within the community context. The framework proposed by Hirschheim et al. provides an adequate vocabulary for this analysis. In the Control orientation, if we examine the black-box view of technology dominant in CI thinking, as discussed above, a number of contradictions emerge. The black box view allows CI to focus strongly on the community problem-solving agenda as a reaction to the technological-rational ideologies that emphasis “efficiencies”. And yet the black-box position is itself an expression of instrumental rationality in that it does not acknowledge the impact that the black box has on the community and its actions; nor does it offer a voice for the community in its construction (and of course, the more interpretive approaches to human-machine interaction in IS offer further opportunities for CI). This suggests that CI needs to acquire the technical knowledge and know-how that would enable CI researchers and practitioners to conduct the discourse necessary to engage meaningfully in the design and construction of artefacts. Such engagement means having the vocabulary and knowledge to interact with the engineers who are responsible for the design and construction or perhaps also to take on such engineering roles. Such an agenda is emerging in CI, for example the work done by Kırlıdoğ in getting people from community organisations and technical specialists to understand each other in articulating requirements for disaster management in rural Anatolia through a participatory methodology (Kırlıdoğ 2006). But even such progressive work falls short of addressing the dual agenda advocated here.

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Thus, the role of CI is to make visible in the design and construction process the impacts of the artefact in the language and organisation domains as well as to adequately address the strategic control, communicative sensemaking and discursive argumentation orientation from its community perspective. The implication of CI acquiring the necessary technical knowledge and know-how is that it will facilitate more innovative ICT projects that span CI and IS, but remain explicitly community focussed, and express the dual agenda. Significantly, such know-how allows CI researchers to adapt the action research methodologies already used in CI to address the dual agenda in order to implement innovative and relevant ICT projects. This will allow CI to be more pro-active in the social action agendas of communities through innovative ICTs that are part of the information systems problem solving agenda. Currently, the socio-technical network approach of CI, particularly as seen through the ANT lens, allows CI to deal with technology as an actor in the network with equal status to other actors. But this is largely rhetorical as the lack of an adequate conceptualisation of technology as a interpretable material agent (Leonardi and Barley 2008) in CI negates a significant role for technology in the emergence of the network and undermines the dual agenda inherent in the network approach. In the Argumentation orientation, the role of technology in networks is critical to understanding social action by the community and the development of the community itself. There are numerous examples of technology playing a central role is community activities (for example the organisation of G8 protests or dissemination of AIDS information) by effectively creating the target community and network. What is interesting about this is that it is community problem-solving, not the information systems problemsolving, that still dominates these discussions even if the role of technology is acknowledged. But this network approach also applies recursively to the interactions between a community and its broader social and political context. This raises questions about how the community voice is heard in that broader context and how technology facilitates interactions within this broader network while also engaging community members in those processes. Example of the possibilities includes work on defining rights in communities (de Moor and Weigand 2006) or the development of politically-responsive systems dealing with potentially highly sensitive personal and private information as raised by Iacovino in her discussion of access rules to community memory archives (Iacovino 2007). On the other hand CI offers a novel perspective, for mainstream IS, of the organisation domain. CI represents a particular ‘non-corporate’ organisations; communities with a philosophy and culture of working to eliminate social disadvantage. This is a real and legitimate dimension that has particular agency on the work that they do in conjunction with ICTs. Such non-profit cultures are not well-known in ICT research which has been much more oriented to address for-profit business, the military, or government (Stillman 2006). While all organisations exhibit some similarities (such as resource problems, training, skills etc), it would be erroneous to engage in a reductionist exercise to view all organisations as being the same. This would ultimately de-politicise the unique character of the community and the social justice concerns that can make CI such a powerful adjunct to social change. Moreover, communities addressed by CI are frequently inchoate, emergent, and ever-changing making it hard for typical IS processes to develop replicable models and templates for implementation (De Moor 2007). It is the social justice concerns, coupled with the dynamic and emergent nature of communities that need to be expressed in all orientations in the framework. The development of social software (Web 2.0) could be an opportunity for CI, with its grass-roots orientation, to react in new ways with different (social) technology platforms. In this space CI can lead and influence the development of practical and theoretically based approaches to such technology and form the basis of a dialogue between CI and IS. Social Informatics (SI) is an existing “intellectual community” within the adhocracy of IS. It has many similarities to CI in that it deals with the development of a coherent approach to user-technology issues that are familiar to CI. Table 2 below represents the relationship of SI and IS developed by Kling and Lamb (2000) but is adapted to include a CI perspective to the issues. The first column represents an historical view of IS dominated by an engineering approach, grounded in the instrumental control orientation. Current IS thinking is now much closer to the SI stream. The third column (in italics), represents a short-hand CI ‘response’ as an ‘ideal type’. The table, overall is intended as a provocation to thinking, modification and documentation for the CI community. It should be recognised, however, that as a ‘target’ this table is always moving, as the tasks and interpretations of change. Moreover these 3 disciplines will appear differently if interpreted more precisely through the lens of Hirschheim et al. framework.

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Table 2: Conceptions of ICT in Organisations, Society and Communities (adapted from (Kling 2000; Kling and Lamb 2000))

Concluding Remarks The challenge for CI is how it can ‘work’ better with the particular technical disciplines in IS. Our aim in this paper has been to try to match sympathetic elements of each complex discipline in order to demonstrate what IS can offer to CI and conversely to identify what CI can contribute to a discourse with IS. The paper argues that an exploration of IS through a social action theoretical lens allows CI to identify and understand core theoretical issues concerning technology, especially artefact design and its organisational context, including its impact on the people affected by its development and the implementation of the artefact. On the other hand the theoretical framework used to explorer the various dimensions of IS also highlights that CI has much to offer with respect to its understanding of IS’s undertheorized conception of organisations that focus on real-world community structures and engagements. We argue that this reading of IS provides an appropriate basis to theoretically grounded CI in its technical agenda and to establish a dialectical relationship with its social action agenda. Moreover we argue that this dual agenda is necessary to strengthen the conceptual, theoretical and practical activity of CI The arguments presented in the paper, while focussing on theoretical aspects, also suggest more practical impacts. The development of a dual agenda for CI would provide a shared conceptual taxonomy with IS that would both enable a productive dialogue between the two disciplines and establish CI as a recognised intellectual community within the adhocracy of IS. The development of the dual agenda is the responsibility of CI researchers but their efforts would be facilitated by bringing together critical and interpretive thinkers in IS with those in CI in forums such as joint conferences, interdisciplinary workshops and SIGs. Such activity would be greatly helped if CI researchers read the key IS research literature. Additionally, CI needs to seriously consider the implications of the dual agenda in terms of educational strategies. Klein and Hirschheim (2008) have recently suggested that ‘boundary spanning’ within the territory of IS through different PhD training options, directly reaching out to industry engagement. CI can engage with IS in order for the community sector to be considered an appropriate venue for ‘industry engagement’. But this needs to be extended to include a joint IS-CI educational strategy that also involves the Master’s level courses, both research based and coursework for practitioners. Such a joint approach would also provide IS with appropriate examples of relevant community focussed contexts within a shared vocabulary. In this endeavour the wealth of rich research in SI already offers a vocabulary and framework that can be quickly adapted to CI in its effort to engage productively with IS.

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Community Informatics and Information Systems 11 Iacovino, L. (2007). Community, Identity and Shared Value Systems from Aristotle to Singer. Constructing and Sharing Memory Community Informatics, Identity and Empowerment L. Stillman and G. Johanson. Newcastle, UK, Cambridge Scholars Publishing. Kırlıdoğ, M. (2006). Requirements determination in a community informatics project: an activity theory approach. OTM Workshops 2006, LNCS 4277., Montpellier, France, Springer Berlin / Heidelberg. Kling, R. (2000). "Learning About Information Technologies and Social Change: The Contribution of Social Informatics." The Information Society 16(3): 217-232. Kling, R. and R. Lamb (2000). IT and Organizational Change in Digital Economies: A Socio-Technical Approach. Understanding the Digital Economy -- Data, Tools and Research. B. Kahin and E. Brynjolfsson. Cambridge, Mass, The MIT Press. Kling, R., G. McKim, et al. (2003). "A bit more to it: Scholarly Communication Forums as Socio-Technical Interaction Networks " Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology 54(1): 47-67. Kubisch, A. C. (1997). Voices from the Field: Learning from the Early Work of Comprehensive Community Initiatives. Washington, DC, Aspen Institute. Kuhn (1970). The structure of scientific revolutions. Chicago, University of Chicago. Lamb, R. and R. Kling (2003). "Reconceptualising users as social actors in information systems research." MIS Quarterly 27(2): 197-235. Leonardi, P. M. and S. R. Barley (2008). "Materiality and change: Challenges to building better theory about technology and organizing." Information and Organization 18(3): 159-176. O'Donovan, B. and D. Roode (2002). "A framework for understanding the emerging discipline of information systems." Information Technology & People 15(1): 26. Orlikowski, W. J. (1992). "The Duality of Technology: Rethinking the Concept of Technology in Organizations." Organization Science 3(3): 398-427. Orlikowski, W. J. (2000). "Using technology and constituting structures: A practice lens for studying technology in organizations." Organization Science 11(Jul/Aug): 404-428. Orlikowski, W. J. and C. S. Iacono (2001). "Research commentary: Desperately seeking "IT" in IT research - A call to theorizing the IT artifact." Information Systems Research; ISR : a journal of the Institute of Management Sciences 12(Jun): 121-134. Rose, N. S. (1999). Powers of freedom reframing political thought. Cambridge, United Kingdom ; New York, Cambridge University Press.

Community Informatics and Information Systems 12 Rothman, J. and J. E. Tropman (1970). Models of Community Organization and Macro Practice Perspectives: Their Mixing and Phasing. Strategies of Community Organization. F. M. Cox. Itasca, Ill, FE Peacock: 3-26. Stillman, L. (2006). Understandings of technology in community-based organisations: a structurational analysis (unpublished PhD). Faculty of Information Technology. Caulfield, Monash University. PhD. Stillman, L. and G. Johanson, Eds. (2007). Constructing and Sharing Memory: Community Informatics, Identity and Empowerment. Newcastle, UK, Cambridge Scholars Publishing. Stoecker, R. (2005). Research methods for community change : a project-based approach. Thousand Oaks, Sage Publications. Suchman, L. (1996). Constituting Shared Workspaces. Cognition and communication at work. Y. Engestrom and D. Middleton. Cambridge ; New York, NY, USA, Cambridge University Press: 35-60. Walsham, G. (1995). "The emergence of interpretivism in IS research." Information Systems Research 6(4): 376-394. Walsham, G. (1995). "Interpretive case studies in IS research: Nature and method." European Journal of Information Systems 4(2): 74.

Community Informatics and Information Systems 13

Table 1

Community Informatics and Information Systems 14

Standard (Tool) perspectives for IS

Social Informatics perspectives

Community Informatics perspectives

IT is primarily an individual tool.

IT is a socio-technical network.

Community networks are social technical relationships and structures for local communities; both people ICTs have degrees of agency.

Business model is sufficient.

Ecological view is needed.

A community model is needed that incorporates depth understanding of the concept of community and community organisations as supporting group social solidarity and human agency.

One shot implementation.

Implementation is an ongoing social process.

Ibid., and is ideally a community-oriented participatory process.

Technological effects are direct and immediate.

Technological effects are indirect and involve different time scales.

Ibid.

Politics are bad or irrelevant.

Politics are central and even enabling.

Community politics are as complex as any other politics. Social justice is critical.

Incentives to change are unproblematic.

Incentives may require restructuring (and may be in conflict with other organizational actions).

Incentives are complex in the community setting.

Relationships are easily reformed.

Relationships are complex, negotiated & multivalent.

Ibid, and language, power, gender, class, disability, ethnicity need to be accounted for.

Social relationships of ICT are big but isolated and benign.

Potentially enormous social repercussions of ICT.

Ibid, and potentially enormous social and community repercussions of ICT

Contexts are simple (a few key terms or demographics).

Contexts are complex

Ibid. In particular, the vocabulary and agency of community and community organisations need to be well understood. Gender, class, disability, ethnicity need to be accounted for

Knowledge and Expertise are easily made explicit.

Knowledge and Expertise are inherently tacit/implicit.

Ibid. ICTs are not at the core of many community/community agencies actions. Social/people technology is just as important and knowledge and expertise are not just tacit or implicit, but may be expressed in unfamiliar ways.

ICT infrastructures are fully supportive.

Additional skill and work are needed to make ICT work

ICTs are an additional layer to humantechnology networks and may encounter resistances. Design decisions are all to often made from above.